For the Old Land: A Tale of Twenty Years Ago by Charles J. Kickham (CP121)

Circa 1908: New Edition / Hardcover / Very Good Condition

Original green embossed cloth with titles on the cover and spine. 384 clean and bright slightly age-toned pages, mild speckled foxing on the endpapers, edges and occasional page within. Boards are rubbed and faded with time and bumped on the corners and spine ends and frayed along the edges consistent with age but remain firm and intact. Scarce! (CP121)

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Kickham’s third novel issued here in a later undated Gill “new edition” returns to the world of rural Tipperary, setting a tale “of twenty years ago” against the mid-nineteenth-century politics of land, parish and secret organisation. If Knocknagow celebrated “the homes of Tipperary”, For the Old Land presses further into the moral and civic claims of nationalism: tenant-right, the pull of kin and community, and the costs of informers and coercion. The tone is recognisably Kickham’s wry, humane, attentive to music, speech and neighbourliness, yet edged by the memory of Fenian struggle. Long a favourite with readers rather than critics, it remains an important companion to his major work.

Charles Joseph Kickham (1828-1882) was a Tipperary-born novelist, poet and leading Fenian activist. Partially blinded and deafened by a teenage accident, he nevertheless became a prominent journalist and editor of The Irish People (the IRB paper). Arrested in 1865 and convicted of treason-felony, he served several years’ imprisonment, experiences that sharpened the conviction and sympathy of his fiction. His landmark novel Knocknagow; or, The Homes of Tipperary (1873) became one of the most widely read Irish books of its century. He died in 1882, remembered as the quintessential writer of Irish rural life joined to nationalist purpose.

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